Chrome OS is Getting Canary Channel for Experimental Features

If you are a Chrome power user, you will know what canary build/channel means there. The news today is, Chrome OS is getting a similar Canary channel. First, let us start by explaining what canary channel is and what it does.

Canary channel is a similar to development channel of Chrome where experimental features show up for early adopters to test. But there is a difference. It is installed as a separate browser. The advantage is, you can install Chrome with stable channel (the normal one, that is ) and keep it for your daily use, and try new features on the canary channel whenever you need.

If you were to use development channel for this purpose, it will replace the stable channel. Canary solves this problem.

Canary Build on Chrome OS

When the canary build lands on Chrome OS, how will it work? I am not really sure. We will have to wait for may be till the next development channel update of Chrome OS to find out how things are planned. Is it going to be similar to windows, with some kind of separation between the existing stable or beta version of Chrome OS and the new Canary channel? Or just another channel in that drop down menu for you to switch to (and leave the channel that you are currently on)

We will have to wait to find out. For now, take a look at the commit log from the Chromium code.

Add extra appids to support changing from/to canary-channels.

We're adding support for moving between all channels including canary-channel.
We need the appids of the board in order to switch from canary to non-canary
channel. Similarly, we need the canary-channel's appid in order to switch from
non-canary to canary channel. This CL adds these two values while preserving
the existing semantics of CHROMEOS_RELEASE_APPID.